Originally published Father's Day, 2006, in the Sunday
Gazette-Mail in Charleston, W.Va.. This essay is adapted from the website 'Calabrian
Journal'
By Douglas Imbrogno
I peer out the window at the Atlantic Ocean's white-flecked face, 30,000 feet below. We rocket eastward. If I could peer 75 years into the past, down there I'd see a ship churning westward. It bears my grandfather, Eugenio Imbrognio, gone to America out of the hills of Calabria in southern Italy.
A few years later comes another ship. In steerage, sits my grandmother, Caterina Napoli Imbrognio, summoned to America by Eugenio. He has found work in an Ohio steel mill. She journeys with their three boys, the youngest just 4 years old. The toddler, who would one day become my father, has left Italy and will never return.
I turn my attention to the cabin, which is filling with light. The pilot announces we'll land in Rome within the hour. Goodbye, America, ciao, Italia. We've traveled 3,100 miles this night, out of the New World, into a bright sun rising above the Old World.
Exotic, Yet Familar
My older brother David and I meet up in Rome with our two aunts, Loretta and Teresa, my father's younger sisters. Born in America, both still retain some of the Italian Calabrese dialect spoken in their house while growing up. From the Termini station in Rome's heart, we plunge six hours south by train to Cosenza in Calabria. We whip past, then Naples then Salerno, the train tracing the coastline along the Thyrennian Sea. Then, it veers inland into the Italian hillbilly heartland.
Our bloodlines go far back in these hills. Yet once introductions begin in Calabria, I soon become thoroughly befuddled as to who is a blood relative. Family ties criss and cross here, where Imbrognos, Napolis, Lupanos, Fazios, all intermarried.
Too many oil-thick espressos in teensy white ceramic cups keep me awake in the jet-lagged evenings. I scribble and ponder, soaking up something that isn't quite knowledge. More like music, a tune exotic yet familiar.
One night, David and I look down on the glittery lights of Cosenza and it suburb, Rende. Ernesto, a second (or third?) cousin on the Napoli (or Imbrogno?) side, points into the valley. He has brought us to this high place to show us something.
That, he says, in Italian, is where somewhere il tesoro di Alerica il Barbarian -- the treasure of Aleric the Barbarian -- is buried, in the Crati River. Or maybe in the Busento, which joins the Crati in Calabria, which flows to the Mediterranean Sea.
For centuries, treasure seekers, scholars, dreamers, have come to Cosenza, seeking but not finding the treasure of this invader who breathed his last here and was buried with his loot in the diverted bed of a river. The river was returned to its course and his treasure passed out of history.
I imagine another history. I try to sense in the night the hillside where my father, where my grandfather and grandmother -- il mio nonno, la mia nonna -- grew up, in houses of stone. I listen to the hills that sheltered my family for centuries, until some took flight for the valleys of America. Pursuing treasures and dreams there.
It's All Relative
In Rende, we're adopted by Teresa and Vittorio, a good thing. Teresa's mother was one of my Grandma Catherine's 12 siblings, which makes her my great aunt. From a side porch off their fifth-floor apartment we glimpse a tiny bloom of tan buildings in the green hills ringing the horizon: San Pietro in Guarano. For the first time, David and I glimpse the town nearest where my father was born. We gaze awhile.
Then, Vittorio picks small hot peppers from a porch pot. With scissors, we snip them over our plates to add a kick to that day's pasta. Teresa serves many memorable meals: pan-fried slabs of nutty scamorzo cheese, homemade gnocchi, spicy plates of corkscrew fusili pasta.
Vittorio urges David and me to eat yet more of the fresh local olives always on the table. And to keep our glasses full of the homemade red wine always at hand. "Douglas," he says, noodging the bottle down the table. "Finish."
One morning, a local man named Roberto, fluent in English and a surprise relative (we seemed to be related to every fourth person in Rende), drives us up to San Pietro in Guarano. As children, my father and grandparents would trek from their farmhouses, by foot or donkey, for a visit to the bustle -- such as it was in the early 20th century -- of San Pietro. There's still not much bustle in this town of precipitous, serpentine streets, perched snug against the lowest clouds.
When asked about my roots, I sometimes joke: "I come from a long line of Italian peasants." Are these "my people"? On my dad's side, the family raised sheep, sold horses. I think that's right. The family history is foggy, snatches of half-remembered tidbits, possibly wrong. Yet here we are, standing where my father took his first fumbling steps. It's another kind of knowing.
Houses of Stone
One morning, Roberto arrives to drive us to the hillside where my father was born. After a switchback 10-minute drive and short hike, we stand upon the hillside where my father, grandfather, grandmother, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather on the Napoli side called home.
The hillside is remarkably fertile still. An orange tree stands near my grandfather's house, fruit the size of billiard balls. High hedges of roses grow by the porch, pink with a musky, spirit-lifting aroma.
Regimented rows of olive trees ring the ridgelines like a thick broccoli forest. We can be sure, Roberto says, we're looking at trees my father and his father looked upon and perhaps harvested. A wall of cane lines the lower hillside. The stiff cane stalks make good sticks to whack olive trees, bringing down a rain of olives when the time is ripe.
As we walk, my hand tickles the heads of thousands of sprigs of yellow-budded fennel, a common sausage flavoring. But its licorice freshness is good straight up as we walk, nature's gratis breath mint.
My Aunt Loretta, the family's devoted genealogist, pauses in the middle of the hill where our family history can be seen as if in chapters. At the bottom is the house where my grandfather, Eugenio, lived as a young man. At the top, a steep walk of about 100 yards through the fennel, sits a larger stone house where his future wife, Caterina, was born and raised. (The story goes my grandfather would see my grandmother on horseback or donkey on the hill. From those first flirtatious glances a family of nearly 200 descendants and counting sprang.)
In the middle of the hill, off in the bushes, lies an even older house where Michele Napoli, my great-grandfather, lived. And his parents, Pietro and Caterina, before that.
Doors to the Past
I eye a copse of old trees and wonder: Did my father rest against that tree when it was a sapling? Did he flee his father's draconian, Old World discipline, escaping into bird calls and rustling leaves? A vision comes to mind of a dark-haired, hazel-eyed boy, peeking from behind gnarled bark.
We're unsure whether my father was born in the lower house or higher one, where the Napolis lived. That's where Eugenio and Caterina moved after they began having children. From one of these front doors my father was led one day, the door closing behind him for good. I picture Caterina hand-in-hand with her youngest boy, named Dulio, the older brothers trailing. Across the ocean they go, through Ellis Island, front door to America.
Mother Nature grasps at the houses with tendrils of vines and assaults of weeds, tenacious in reclaiming all that has been imposed upon the land. But Calabrian contadinos build tenacious homes of their own.
A door to the back of my grandfather's house gives a glimpse inside this peasant world. I expect to find gloomy walls and decay. But the walls are cheery, splashed with faded, but still pastel colors of pink, green and blue.
All three houses are no longer lived in, though the land is still kept up. And other families resided here after my relatives left. Yet the rooms are full of the evidence of living: piles of dusty wine bottles, steamer trunks, weathered books, old jackets, ancient calendars. One of these rooms is where my father was birthed one September day in 1925.
Inside a storage room lie tools for wresting a living from the hills -- a rusted pickax, a draft horse collar. It was as if someone had stashed them after a day's hard work 80 years ago. David and I are both struck by the sight of an old coat, hung on a nail in a room whose floor fell in ages ago. It's easy to imagine it’s my Grandpa Gene's work coat, hung there after a day working with the tools around back.
I've arrived in Italy wearing a $300 distressed leather jacket, purchased at a Kenneth Cole shop in Las Vegas. I bought it new but paid so much since it looks and feels old, the leather deliberately smudged and buttery soft. It's nearly the same color as this genuinely worn jacket.
The reason I could ever afford mine, I remind myself, is because of all the blood, sweat and tears encoded in these three houses, perched in a row on this Italian hillside.
Root stock
In the house of my great-great-grandfather, we find empty wine barrels. Centuries of wine were made in this room, says Roberto, our newfound relative whose family also once lived in the topmost house.
Here, he says, they would "jog on da' grapes." He points to a concrete basin in the petite two-story stone house. "This maybe 200, 300 years old," he says, wrapping his arm around the ancient wine press as if it's an old friend.
Other relatives lead us to a well-kept, often-visited cemetery near Rende, where we discover family graves and Imbrognos buried in profusion.
Once my father had moved from the Ohio town where his father settled -- a place where many Imbrognos would eventually be listed in the phone book -- the pickings got slim in other cities where we came to live. We kids would search for our name in phone books, usually coming up empty.
To see tomb after tomb lettered with the names of related Imbrognos and Napolis -- here is Divina, my grandmother's sister, here's Michele and Luisa, my great-grandparents -- is a reminder of our root stock.
Later, my brother and I spend a quiet afternoon in the houses where my father was born and raised. It's a gift, a lesson. We were a seed blown across the Atlantic from these rich fields.
We bring something back. David finds a portion of the red roof tile from my grandfather's house, fallen to the ground. Back in America, on my father's last day on earth, Jan. 8, 2005, David eased into his dying hand a tile from the house Dad first called home.
For an extended version of this essay with more photos see www.hundredmountain.com/calabrianjournal. See the companion photo essay by David Imbrogno at www.cowgarage.com